Former Ottawa Senator Chris Kelly named to Canadian Olympic hockey team

Chris Kelly has been around long enough to recall the last time National Hockey League players weren’t at the Olympics.

“I remember watching (Paul) Kariya and (Petr) Nedved (in 1994),” Kelly said Thursday in a phone interview with Postmedia after being named to Canada’s Olympic hockey team for the Pyeongchang Games in February.

“You’re glued to the TV when Canada is playing, regardless of the event. When a Canadian team or a Canadian athlete is competing, you’re always cheering them on.”

Now, at 37, after playing more than 920 regular-season and playoff games in the NHL, including two stints with the Ottawa Senators and winning a Stanley Cup with the Boston Bruins in 2011, Kelly finds it a bit bizarre that he has ended up being part of the five-ring Olympic circus.

He said playing in the Olympics “wasn’t even on the radar two months ago.”

The road to Pyeongchang took some strange turns.

Kelly wasn’t re-signed by the Senators after his contract expired July 1, but he trained as if he had a contract, believing he had some game left. He went to Edmonton on a professional tryout offer from the Oilers, but wasn’t signed after training camp. He returned home to Ottawa to contemplate the next move and opted to join the Senators’ American Hockey League affiliate in Belleville.

It was only after he was invited to join Canada’s Spengler Cup squad over the Christmas break that he contemplated Olympic possbilities.

“It wasn’t a plan or a goal I had in mind when the season started,” said Kelly, who will play with Belleville until the Canadian training camp opens. “It got to the point where I wasn’t getting any feelers from the NHL, so I decided to play in Belleville to see what would come out of it. The Spengler Cup came out of that and only then did I start thinking about the Olympic team.”

Chris Kelly, front, battles for the puck in Canada’s Spengler Cup game against the Mountfield club squad in Davos on Dec. 26. Melanie Duchene/Keystone

Kelly says he hasn’t seen enough of other national teams — he played against the Swiss national team during the Spengler Cup — to give a realistic pre-Olympic prediction about the Canadian team’s chances.

He is, however, full of national pride.

“When you do something of this magnitude, the goal is to win,” he said. “You’re going there to represent your country as best as you can.”

As Kelly tried to come to terms with anything and everything about the Olympic experience, he pored over the names of his Canadian teammates. Ottawa-area natives Eric O’Dell and Derek Roy are also on the squad, as is former Rob Klinkhammer, who had two assists in 15 games with the Senators in 2011-12.

“I know Derek well. The hockey world is a small world,” Kelly said of Roy, a former Buffalo Sabres star. “There’s always mutual respect.”

At Pyeongchang, Kelly could also bump into some former Senators on the United States team: winger Bobby Butler, who scored 16 goals in 94 games with Ottawa between 2009 and 2012; defencemen Matt Gilroy, who played 14 games in 2011-12; and Mike Lundin, who played 11 games in 2012-13.

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